Do I Love You or an Idea of You?
O Lover,
I begin ambivalently, raising this prayer-post with hesitancy. As starters, there is a pandemic-like pattern of self-deception in our society regarding both religion and spirituality. Ideational and ideological idolatries abound with the old graven sort now passé. Further, the struggle to marshal the intellect and its egoic craftings toward the transcending of that very faculty is a task both difficult and ongoing. Ideation, not least in the precincts of religion, works its way out of a job only most reluctantly. Finally, I have long viewed myself as vulnerable to mental grandeurs, intriguing theologies not excepted. Castles in the sky have probably shaped me more often than have those encircled by moats. Yes, I am susceptible in all of the above.
You see, I have found myself in a dilemma. Various traditional theological formulations propounded by the church leave me tepid and unmoved. I have needed simply to unhook some of them from the Reality of You whom I episodically glimpse but cannot seize. What has repeatedly shocked me is that the Fire who is You has not waned amid such unhooking with the result that in recent decades I have increasingly opened myself to novel and fresher forms. I view none of these as adequate, let alone inerrant—nor could they be—but I experience them as useful in my being drawn toward You, occasionally enflamed by You. Indeed, sometimes they—these provisional ideas, images, and other pointers—seem to be all that I have. I ask You to receive them, shards of this earthen vessel (a la II Cor 4:7), one long since resigned to being drawn by Your Fire. I have experienced You to be both Chief Agent and Freedom Itself, and what I have scratched out above reflects my attempt to respond to this tension. While I remain perplexed by my elapsed journey, what is clearer is that it is what it is.
Again I segue into the interrogative: How does a finite creature awaken to glimpses, inklings, and intimations of You, the Infinite One, while refusing to abolutize/idolatrize mediations in the process? How does the pilgrim both drink of, even while letting go of, moments of translucence to You who are beyond all images, ideas, and dogma? How does the trekker remain alert to Your variegated nudgings even while striving to embody “yes” to You who are, as Eckhart put it, “No-thing”? How does unítas Déi, the overriding hunger, unfold while avoiding both the absolutizing of the finite and the trivializing of You, the Infinite?
Finally, like Gregory the Great, I plead intentionality. While I surely do not always love You unconditionally, to my best self-knowledge I desire this. I thus ask You both to receive and discard my ideas, images, and other depictions of You toward the télos of no longer seeing You merely via a “mirror dimly” (I Cor 13:12). I request that You do so as I long and hope to be, but, alas, am not yet. Gregory has shown me that You inexplicably and wondrously honor this foibled desire. Stated otherwise, I lay claim to the opening prayer of the anonymous The Cloud (c. 1385): “O God unto whom all hearts lie open / unto whom desire is eloquent . . .” That desire, groping out beyond any idea, image or projection of You, has surely become an intrinsic part of who I am.
